Express Yourself /////// Isabelle Ferguson
A former Honors Council President said: "My emotions are the color beige."
It seems like the status quo of society is to never show too much emotion. People become uncomfortable with your over-expression. When you lose someone or something, there is a social grieving period. After a while, everyone expects you to move on or to not bother the outside world with your sadness. When you're so joyful that you don't care how weird you are dancing or how off-key your singing is, people will apply labels such as annoying, weird, or excessive to your entire persona. The contrary to this is when you don't show enough emotion. Say you're happy, but you don't smile, or you simply don't smile often. Suddenly, people have you in their heads as a cold person with no feelings. The same is true when you experience loss. If you do not display some form of sorrow, you are heartless. Why do we restrict each other on our expression of emotion? It seems that is the main reason so many of us need therapy. We never know when we are expressing too much emotion. We become so focused on making others comfortable, we disable our own passions and emotions.
C.S. Lewis argues in the first part of The Abolition of Man that what is being taught to upcoming generations is a hindrance, because it disables a part of them. This part is required to produce qualities which would deem the upcoming generations as functional in society. Lewis says the part being disabled is the chest within the Platonic soul. This part of the body allows the individual to feel strong emotions. It is the drive behind the mind, which leads the individual. At the end of the first part of the lecture, Lewis talks about the contradiction within his society. The teachers have lead their pupils to remove the part of themselves which gives them drive and motivation in order to "protect" the individual from possible scams or plays on their feelings. The Honors Program prides itself on having a fierce hunger for knowledge and understanding of the world around us. This hunger would be absent without the chest muscle in the Platonic Soul. I believe that is what C.S. Lewis is getting at. Intelligence is worthless without a reason or feeling behind it.
P.S. I commented on Emory's and Emily Thullesen's posts.
Hey Isabelle, I think I understand what you mean about people being uncomfortable with what they see as over- or under-expression in another person. What I find ironic is how they reveal their own negative emotions when they negatively criticize the expressions of others! When one might describe their own off-key singing as "a joyful noise" because one feels joyful, the critic calls it "annoying" because the critic himself feels annoyed. I also like what you said at the end: "intelligence is worthless without a reason or feeling behind it." Good post!
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with your argument. So often children are taught cruel lessons by their piers to not act a certain way. They should express the “appropriate emotion” at the “appropriate time”. They should not express joy or excitement physically (waving hands, bouncing, stomping, or other stimming). In addition to this, I liked how you pointed out how society responds to grief. When someone experiences a loss there are expectations immediately thrusted upon them. They should be upset but not too upset— sad but not disruptively so. They are allowed to grieve for a few days or even a week but when that time is over everyone expects them to move on. Grief doesn’t work like that, so when someone breaks down a year after they experienced the loss they are viewed as strange or unstable.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with the emotion part, Isabelle. I know for me personally, I tend to not show a lot of emotion, not because I don’t have any, but simply because I try not to let my emotions rule me. I’m sure some people probably think I’m heartless or a word that I won’t say.
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